Tag Archives: William Spady. Hewlett Deep Learning

Going through the actual Performance Assessments in the last post reminded me of what a useful mind altering and emotion manipulation tool they will be for someone like Climate and Population Alarmist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich has long wanted http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/learning-to-learn-or-how-to-replace-old-minds-with-sustainable-new-ones/ to use education to “change the way we perceive the world, the way humanity sees the world in order to survive.” But I did not know when I wrote that post that both he and the US Climate Change Aspiring Professional Bureaucracy and Collection of Rent Seekers would publish reports that came out late last week. Just full of plans on how to use education to physically change minds and arouse emotions to support their lucrative “research” agenda.

Now Research Agenda has clearly become a euphemism for telling us what we must or cannot do and to gain unprecedented levels of political, social, and economic control. At least in the US and any other country of free citizens. I will start with Ehrlich since we have been tracking his aspirations for New Human Minds Incapable of Ingenuity and Inventiveness for a while. His essay entitled “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?” is clearly designed to elicit an “I certainly hope so. What must we do right now?” response. It starts with a mention of previous collapses and then cites to Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. Very dramatic. We instinctively visualize those statues on Easter Island with no trees around and wonder will that be us? Except Ehrlich’s 1989 book on the conscious evolution of new human minds has a Jared M. Diamond listed as one of the helpful commenters on his manuscript to be thanked. I am starting to think that civilizational collapse books unless we change as outlined are a booming business. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full.pdf+html

Not to be mean but it is a hyperbolic essay clearly designed to try to create hysteria and the Ehrlichs’ mania for control over us shows through repeatedly. He also envisions some sort of rule by academics which appears to be all the rage at Stanford. I wonder if he and Linda Darling-Hammond do lunch in the sunshine to talk about those SBAC Performance Assessments or how Effective Teaching just happens to coincide with creating New Minds? Anyway, to avoid collapse:

“there is a need for natural scientists to collaborate with social scientists, especially those who study the dynamics of social movements. Such collaborations could develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on the predicament.”

So we taxpayers get to pick up the bill for all those social and natural scientists whose payday is contingent on finding such potential catastrophes and planning for them. And lobbying us and persuading us we are the misguided ones. No conflicts there. And then hitting us up for more money to fund continuous planning. Now Ehrlich wants “fundamental institutional change” in educational systems and he happens to mention a new project at Stanford–the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere.” MAHB wants to create a new kind of intelligence, foresight intelligence, that sounds ever so much better than Newmindedness or Peter Senge’s Systems Thinking even if it works much the same. FI as I shall call it is the 21st century aspiration to “implement behavioral, institutional and cultural changes necessary for humans to ensure a sustainable and equitable future for all.”

I am not picking on the Ehrlichs but this entire operation of gutting it all using the plans of people whose only skin in the game is that they get paid well for such advocacy is ludicrous. The unintended consequences are likely to be horrific and the intended ones seem quite grim as well unless you are in the planning class. That becomes quite apparent when we don’t accept Ehrlich’s description of MAHB as “nascent” like a newborn just opening its eyes. Instead MAHB had a 2011 name change from its previous more apt description of the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. And just in case you are worried that MAHB might have all-encompassing aspirations. They do include the “values, attitudes, and actions of individual and collective actors.” Which will certainly make those performance assessments timely since that is what they target and measure. MAHB also wants to change towards sustainablity to take place “across all domains of human life”–mentioning “institutional arrangements, social structures, norms, and cultural practices.”

Only someone without a knowledge of history or economics could advocate deliberately redesigning and changing all those things and proclaim it is to avoid civilizational collapse. It’s much more likely to bring it on as all the factors that create human progress and prosperity get targeted for gutting to enable widespread submission to such schemes. Ehrlich even calls these changes via education a “soft means” to advance public policy but the landing is likely to be quite hard. Laying out the fellow international players does not help. It just adds to the toxicity of the brew being hatched to use “social science and humanities” to sway minds by metaphorically lobotomizing them.

Research Goal 6 on page 1041 of that NCA draft lays out the plan for education and workforce development. I know you will be Shocked, Shocked to learn it just happens to mirror what Spady called Life Role Complex Performances and others are describing as Deep Learning (Hewlett), Higher Order Thinking (Webb’s DOK), Second Order Change (MCREL), Global Competence, and 21st Century Skills. You’d almost think there was active coordination going on. Here goes [my snark in brackets]:

“Building human capacity to respond to the emerging challenges described in this Assessment [are you as tired of that word as I am? It should be listed in Terms of Duplicity for Aspiring Statists] requires expansion of skills within the existing public and private sectors [lucrative retraining for academia. Like an annuity] and developing a new workforce that excels at critical and interdisciplinary thinking. [They don’t know much and much of what they believe is false but they are passionately devoted to these beliefs and committed to acting on them.] Useful capacities include facilitation and communications skills [a 2 inch leap], integration of new technologies and data sources into existing programs and practices [vocational with lucrative ICT contracts available for Cronies], management of collaborative processes to allow for imaginative solutions [unimpeded by knowledge to prompt a logical “this won’t work” response], development and use of sustainable technologies to reduce climate risks [more ICT contracts and Solyndras and Fisker exploding batteries], and building frameworks for decision-making in an internationally interdependent world.”

Education, K-12 and higher ed, used to be about empowering each of us as much as possible with the knowledge of what worked, or didn’t, in the past so we could make good decisions as adults about our own lives and what we valued. No more. Now it is apparently about hobbling our ability to be independent so we will surrender “decision-making” to others.

And we won’t mind or even notice.

Now once again. Where is the likelihood of collapse really coming from?